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Some more Exchange 2007 links to get through…

Get ready for Exchange 2007

Well, the IT’s Showtime team have products a “Get ready for Exchange 2007 roadshow” videos. You can watch your way through a set of videos discussion architecture, deployment, management and Unified Communications from the guys at corp. Here’s a list of sessions released recently…
http://blogs.technet.com/eileen_brown/archive/2007/01/22/get-ready-for-exchange-2007.aspx

Exchange Webcasts for February
http://blogs.technet.com/eileen_brown/archive/2007/01/22/exchange-webcasts-for-february.aspx

Tips for managing the Exchange Server 2007 Console views

In Exchange 2007, the Recipient Configuration node and its child nodes (Mailbox, Distribution Group, Mail Contact, Disconnected Mailbox) of the Exchange Management Console (console) are used for recipient management. By default, up to 1000 recipients in the current domain are displayed in the result pane of the Recipient Configuration node and its child nodes. For organizations with more than 1000 recipients, 1000 recipients have to be displayed by default while they may not be the specific set of recipients that you want to manage, and you may not want to wait until they are displayed. This article gives a few tips to manage and speed up the console view.
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/01/19/432275.aspx

RTM Exchange Server 2007 Setup GUI Walkthrough

Exchange 2007 introduces a completely rewritten Setup GUI experience, designed to match the Administrative experience you’ll get with Exchange 2007 Management Console once the installation is completed. Like the Exchange 2007 Management Console, the new Exchange Setup is written on top of the Windows PowerShell cmdlets and is therefore completely scriptable with one-liners!

In the rest of this blog post, I’ll show you the new GUI and talk about the various options available throughout the setup process.
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/01/18/432264.aspx

Last week Juha reported that TradeMe experienced a ten hour outage due to a failure of one of their core, load-balancers. This morning, TradeMe appears to be down again:

UPDATE: TradeMe have now posted the following message, doesn’t look too good.

11 January – Problems this morning
Trade Me’s auction site suffered a database failure at 3:50 am this morning, and was unavailable between 3:50 am and 8:05 am this morning.

All auctions closing between 3:50 am and 9 am have been extended by 24 hours. Eg. an auction scheduled to close at 6 am this morning will now close at 6 am tomorrow.

We also had some data problems between 11:55 pm last night and 3:50 am this morning. We are continuing to investigate this issue.

We sincerely apologise to all the Trade Me community for the disruption and inconvenience this outage has caused. We will post further updates here if other relevant information comes to hand.

Bill Gates presented the keynote at CES a short while ago and I’m just watching the streaming video now. Lots of Windows Vista features displayed, nothing which really excites me at all. Zune mp3 player gets a bit of a push too – number 2 mp3 player in it’s segment?? Windows Live……

Most exciting announcement so far has been the addition of a new server product targeted for homes called Windows Home Server. At first glance it doesn’t seem that interesting, and nothing that couldn’t be achieved with free, open-source software. However, dig a little deeper and you’ll find a bunch of really innovative features that you won’t find anywhere else yet. The most interesting of these is the storage management features: Windows Home Server doesn’t use drive letters, instead all storage is aggregated into one large storage group, and within that storage group data is replicated among the drives to provide redundancy so that drives can be added or removed without worrying about what data is stored on them. Windows Home Server will be available as a beta within the next couple of months with a release date aimed at the second half of the year. Paul Thurrott has a more in-depth review with some screenshots. Another compelling feature is the ability to access all of your files remotely using a Windows Live address that is configured for your Windows Home Server. This also allows you to upload photos to your server over the internet from wherever you are in the world.

The Xbox 360 also gets a lot of coverage, and rightly so – the Xbox 360 really is becoming the hub of entertainment in your living room that Microsoft have been aiming towards for the last few years. Along with the TV and movie downloads that are already available, Microsoft have now added IPTV access from the Xbox 360. This is not as compelling for those of us that live in IPTV-deprived countries but the potential that this opens is huge. I’m not too sure how Sony can compete with this – the integration into the rest of Microsoft’s products may win over consumers here.

Another interesting part of the keynote was the presentation between Ford and Microsoft about the new “Sync” device that will be fitted to certain Ford models starting with the current Focus model. Sync provides connectivity between your car and all of your portable devices such as mp3 players, phones, cameras, etc. You can listen to text messages from your phone read out to you by your car’s text-to-voice system. You can be talking on your phone while getting into your car and seamlessly switch to your car phone without hanging up. You can access your mp3 player through the car stereo and create playlists using the voice-recognition software.

Bill Gates finished the keynote presentation with a demo of  a room of the future which I don’t think we’ll be seeing anytime soon. Overall it was an interesting presentation – I wasn’t overly impressed with the Wow factor of Windows Vista or Windows Live, but the Home Server product and the Xbox 360 definitely impressed me.

I’m still not sure who will come out on top in the console wars, or whether the Blu-ray disc will prevail over HD-DVD – but if you visit this site and watch the videos, you may be convinced that the PS3 has it all! 

Link to PLAYB3YOND.COM

You can now download the full Exchange help file in CHM format. In previous versions there were a number of large Word documents that needed to be downloaded to get all the operations guides, so this compact help would be very convenient to anyone who will working with Exchange 2007 in the future.

Link here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/…

Well the holidays are coming to a close so we’re preparing to head back to work tomorrow. The weather in Wellington has been a real disappointment with the coldest December on record (it’s supposed to be summer!) and so far January hasn’t been that much better.

The year ahead will bring some big changes to our life. We’re going to be moving house by the end of March so we’re looking to buy our first home. Then we’re expecting the birth of our first baby in June.

I predict a good year ahead!

Read this blog post from Seth Godin a while back but I was thinking about it yesterday so had to look it up again: When to start

Too often we find too many reasons not to do something, rather than just getting stuck in.

Found this interesting article on the Computerworld site this morning about projects going bad:
The people aspect of project failure

And another interesting article here: Market for IT contractors still expanding

Microsoft’s new homepage which was previously available through a beta link is now live – www.microsoft.com. It’s very impressive from a technological point-of-view, but I don’t think it’s actually that functional. More like a case of excessive ,unnecessary AJAX that doesn’t ease the use of the site. Still it’s quite nice to look at and I do like the thumbnails feature, but thankfully they haven’t rolled it out to the whole site though.

I was told by Microsoft last week that the RTM version of Exchange would only be made available in 64bit versions – even for evaluation purposes. This came as a bit of a shock as I’ve always been under the impression that there would be a 32bit version of the software available for use in test labs and demos. Well it’s good to see that MS are actually releasing a 32bit version for evaluation purposes only, and you can download it now from this link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=444C259E-605F-4A82-96D5-A2F448C9D4FF&displaylang=en

So I guess the expected question is why there isn’t a 32bit version that’s available for production use too? Small businesses don’t need 64bit as they generally have less than 100 mailboxes. Also, why would you need to run the Edge Transport role on 64bit hardware when all it’s doing is acting as an SMTP relay? I don’t think the problem is the 64bit hardware as most recent servers support either AMD’s x64, or Intel’s EM64T platform – the problem is that you need to upgrade to 64bit Windows Server, and make sure that all software that will be running on the box is 64bit compatible. This would include backup agents, anti-virus software, management software, and anything else that needs to run on the box – don’t forget that SMBs usually don’t have dedicated Exchange boxes so there is often software running on the box too.